Alex Johnston has scored 213 NRL tries. We mapped every single one of them

Never the biggest. Often not even the fastest. And by many measures of a modern winger, which he freely acknowledges, not the best.

Nonetheless, Alex Johnston has made rugby league history. Ken Irvine’s all-time Australian record of 212 tries is all his thanks to Friday night’s two keenly awaited tries against the Roosters.

And for all the anticipation, Johnston’s try-scoring feats are really a matter of just how far will he go – and how much further can he extend one of rugby league’s more astounding numbers?

Particularly when you break down exactly how he’s got to this very point – 213 tries and counting.

Johnston makes no bones about playing outside the best left edge of the past five years. He knows Cody Walker and Latrell Mitchell have put plenty of his tries on a platter, and told the Herald as much in an interview late last year.

“I love playing with ‘T-Mitt’ [Mitchell],” Johnston said. “Cody Walker has given me most of my tries, but Trell would be the second most.”

The boot of Adam Reynolds and the brute force of Greg Inglis are more than handy options to call upon as well. Burgess brothers Sam and George, Manly enforcer Nathan Brown and now-Rabbitohs staffer John Sutton have all leant a hand over the years as well.

Johnston’s place atop rugby league’s greatest try-scorers is assured. Immortals in waiting, premiership-winners, Origin and Kangaroos champions all lie in his wake.

Between them, the top 11 (Matt Sing and Hazem El Masri rank equal 10th on 159 tries) try-scorers in history have crossed the line no less than 1960 times.

And as to how far can Johnston go? Champion Data has pegged his average try-scoring haul at 17.2 tries per season, or almost nine tries from every 10 games he has played.

Injuries have curtailed that rate in the past two seasons. But Johnston has a new two-year deal with Souths that will see him through 2026 and 2027.

And it’s hard to imagine the likes of Walker, Mitchell, Cameron Murray and the like playing any less than they have in the past 18 months – so a yearly haul of 12-14 tries to match his past two seasons seems a fair, if conservative, stab.

As reported by this masthead, Johnston has a clause in his new Rabbitohs deal to negotiate at any time with the incoming PNG franchise for 2028, by which point Johnston will be 33. If he’s still playing, the smart money is it will be for the NRL’s newest side.

Adding another 20-30 tries by the time retirement calls feels like a reasonable estimate, so too a new high-water mark of 230-240 tries.

So who could eventually take the record from him? Daniel Tupou (184 tries and 34 years old) and Josh Addo-Carr (159 tries, 30) are his closest contemporaries, but time is against them.

Warriors flyer Alofiana Khan-Pereira is the only current player who can trump Johnston’s strike-rate. But he struggled for a game at the Titans and is now fighting for one at the Warriors too.

Ronaldo Mulitalo’s record surprises a little, with both he and Xavier Coates in with a shot if they keep playing and scoring for another decade.

As we mention Tupou, the once baby giraffe who came to truly dominate the airways and left wing for the Roosters, he and Johnston have been the game’s most consistent try-scorers of the past decade, and a double century beckons for the veteran flyer.

Looking at Johnston’s year-on-year record, it effectively boils down to this: if he’s on the paddock, he’s scoring tries.

The 2018 campaign – when Souths played a preliminary final under Anthony Seibold and Johnston played the entire year at fullback – is the only season when Johnston was fit and didn’t finish with a bagful of tries.

The 2021 and 2022 seasons are particular, record-breaking outliers (no-one else scored 30 tries in back-to-back seasons) for Johnston thanks to the introduction of set restarts and attacking players like Walker and Mitchell running riot.

Lastly, spare a thought for the Tigers – who always seem to feature in these types of statistics from the past decade, for obvious reasons.

Johnston’s 20 tries against the joint-venture make them his favourite rival, closely followed by Parramatta and the Roosters (18 apiece).

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